The oral history of Demonware, and how it helped shape online gaming over the last decade

When Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins dropped their Gamecraft podcast, it became an instantly essential piece of video games (and business) history. But I also thought it had a couple of gaps, one of those was a middleware episode, looking at the technology behind the well known consumer names. So Sean Blanchfield and I decided we’d fix that, starting with the oral history of Demonware, the multiplayer middleware company we founded in 2003 straight out of university, which ended up becoming Activision Blizzard’s online technology stack for Call of Duty and beyond.

Recorded at Sean’s house in Dublin late last year (all delays are mine), this was a candid conversation with him about building a startup in an unusual industry at a remarkable time and now being able to look back and talk about some of the decisions we made (much face-palming). If you’re into video games or startup history or you just want a snapshot of what it was like to build a company in 2003 (in Ireland!), then you’ll probably enjoy this. Just please don’t go searching for our profile pics at the time.

Here are Spotify, Apple and YouTube listening options as you prefer. And the full transcript is here if you’d like to read instead.

(Btw, one of the most remarkable things about Demonware is that it still exists! Last year they celebrated their 20yr anniversary, a really amazing achievement for any technology company.)